Mitchell Kapor Foundation Weblog

Yes, it’s true that we’ve been falling off with our blog entries. As some of you have already heard first hand, we’re (hopefully) in the final stages of our program planning for 2010, which we started in earnest last July.

When this grantmaking program structure was launched in August 2007, we decided to learn about and participate in the respective program arenas, green justice and civic engagement, by meeting key players and supporting promising work by effective organizations. This learning process would allow us to evaluate our work and make better decisions about how to better target our resources and efforts for the long haul in the progressive movement. In trying to maintain the equilibrium between our capacity, our interests, and the revenue available for grantmaking and programs (which was cramped by the economic recession, of course), this may mean that we work with fewer organizations over time toward a commonly-identified goal. As a matter of fact, all of the supplementary research and thinking that we’ve done thus far supports that strategy. But our plan ain’t finished cookin’ yet.

By the beginning of December, we hope to have our 2010 program plans in place. Our three core program areas – Green Access, VoICE, and the College Bound Brotherhood – will stay the same. We will still have a general request for applications.  But we will most likely have other, deeper changes in store.

Please stay tuned and check back with us (via the website) in December about moving forward in 2010. We’re getting ready by spending more time planning and less time blogging!

(Artwork borrowed from thewritingloft.com)

Each year, the James Irvine Foundation recognizes individual leaders from any sector — nonprofit, public or private — and in any field, such as education, health, housing, economic development or the environment, who are advancing innovative and effective solutions to significant California issues.  Four to six award recipients will each receive $125,000 in organizational support and assistance in sharing their effective program models with policymakers and other practitioners.

Nominations for the 2010 James Irvine Foundation Leadership Awards are due by October 13, 2009, and awards will be announced in April 2010.  Nominations are welcome from people who are well-acquainted with the leader or leadership group and can verify their qualifications for the award.  More details about the awards are given at the James Irvine Foundation website along with selection criteria, profiles of past recipients, and answers to frequently asked questions.

Again, the deadline is October 13, 2009.

Back in 2007, the Foundation worked with Blueprint Research & Design on a logic model and a corresponding program structure for our work. We launched our current program areas and grantmaking priorities on July 31st of that year with the intention of getting our feet wet for two years, stopping to reflect, and then mapping out plans to get more deeply involved in these program areas and social movements.

As part of the reflection process, we decided early on to set up an evaluation of our programs. We genuinely aim to be responsive to community needs, and sought the “unvarnished truth” that an externally-conducted evaluation provides. We were particularly interested in the efficacy of our interactions with nonprofits, and the impact of our support on organizations’ work and outcomes.

Now that two years have passed, we have collected a host of internal observations about what we’re doing and how to do it better. Earlier in the summer, Blueprint completed their external evaluation of our work, which reinforces many of the same findings and feelings we have about ourselves (btw, it’s hard to write about this stuff without seeming like a navel-gazer).

Read the evaluation highlights here. (pdf)

Many thanks to the nonprofit partners (formerly known as “grantees”) who participated in the evaluation and provided useful and honest feedback to us. It should go without saying (but I’ll say it anyway) that we look forward to proactively incorporating changes that will make our partnerships stronger and smoother. And in the future, we next look to do an outcomes evaluation to examine what kind of broader effect our involvement is having in the community.

We heard you loud and clear.  Some of you mentioned wanting to have an electronic version of our grant application prior to going into our online system to make it easier to cut and paste responses.  So, we have added an electronic sample grant application, which can always be found under ‘Submit a Request‘ in our ‘How to Apply‘ section.  We’re constantly tweaking our process to make things as smooth and seamless as possible, so thanks for all the feedback you give us in your final reports.  It’s really valuable!!

Painting by Robert Shetterly, from his Americans Who Tell The Truth series

I went to bed last night and did that thing you’re never supposed to do in order to get a good night’s sleep: opened my laptop, went to the New York Times, and started poking around.

About half way down the page was the news of Van Jones’ resignation from the Obama Administration as the Special Adviser for Green Jobs. Within seconds of reading the article, the sad truth about the limits of this presidency became very, very real.  I met Van briefly when I first moved to Oakland in 2000 and our paths crossed numerous times as my great friend Zachary Norris deferred NYU law school because he was so inspired by the work of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and the leadership Van offered.  Van is a true intellectual, an amazing orator, and the most down to earth human being you will ever meet.

Over the course of the last months, I’ve been a giggling skeptic of the power that Glenn Beck has over the state of American politics.  I imagined it to be peripheral, on the margins of American society, and at the end of the day powerless.  Today, I can’t help but think: What have we done?  As progressives, we have let one of our great leaders, activists, and thinkers fall and still the streets of Oakland, DC, and  New York are quiet.  As progressives, we continue to let the administration fall under the relentless scrutiny of Republicans and, worst yet, right-wing talking heads and assume that it will have little to no effect on the movement we worked so hard for.  What have we done?  And more importantly, what can we do to make sure this never happens again?

Can’t stop won’t stop: http://cantstopwontstop.com/blog/time-to-knuckle-up-on-van-jones-resignation/
Sierra Club: http://sierraclub.typepad.com/carlpope/2009/09/we-all-blew-it.htm

(In response to an email I recently received)

When I get ready to go before my board with grant recommendations, I bring the ones that I think are the best bet – solid leadership, goals, plans, strategies, evaluation and, yes, even a decent website in this 2.0 age!

Has it ever dawned on you that I can’t make a case – even to myself – for supporting your program if you don’t come correct? I should get the money because I’m on the front lines in the community is NOT a viable nor justifiable rationale! The Give me the money because I know what to do approach doesn’t cut it either. Typos and muddled language do not help. Disregarding the guidelines does not help. Having no website, no financial systems, no org chart, and no strategic or operations plan DOES NOT HELP. And if you don’t know how to do these things – or don’t even know what you need to know – rather than dropping the quite tired excuse of Blaming the System, you betta ask somebody! CompassPoint and the Foundation Center are two of the resources that provide these “best of the basics.” Or even still, ask a program officer to arrange 30 minutes for some coaching or feedback.

Yes, there are a lot of things wrong with the philanthropic sector. I was in a meeting yesterday when the presenter said the word “racism” and I could see some of the other folks recoiling. We have much work to do in this field. But just as we need to step up while working on the inside of this sector, some of you need to tighten up on the outside!

Rant over.  Lawd have mercy, where are my blood pressure pills??

Over the past four weeks, my nephew, Michael, has been visiting from North Carolina.  During this first of hopefully many visits to California, he has been a volunteer here at the Mitchell Kapor Foundation learning about the work we do and helping us get some important things done as we move into the next fiscal year.  I’m really proud of the work he has accomplished during this short visit.  He even had an opportunity to volunteer at Glide Memorial to serve lunch along with other colleagues here in our offices.  Hopefully, we send him home with new skills, knowledge, and perspective.  Here is what Michael had to say about his stay here:

“Volunteering at the Mitchell Kapor Foundation has been a very exciting experience. I never really understood the real world and how it’s so fast moving and doesn’t wait for anybody. It’s always on the go, and you have to be ready to move with it, or you’ll get left behind. I didn’t think it would be hard to work in an office job, but little did I know what I was getting myself into. The first couple of days I got to get a feel for the working environment, but soon after that I was put to work. I had to do papers and documents and more papers and documents. It was really hard, but I started getting into the flow of things, and that really helped me get a system and a plan to complete all the things I needed to accomplish. I have had fun meeting the new people at the Mitchell Kapor Foundation. I had a wonderful boss (Cedric Brown) that taught me some real key concepts to help me not just in the office but in the real world as well. I met a wonderful lady (Carmen ) that made me laugh from the first time I met her. She always has a positive attitude and kept a smile on my face all the time. But last but not least, there’s my Aunt (Tiffany Price) who gave me this wonderful opportunity to come down here and spend some time with her and get to see what it is like to live on your on and have to take trains and buses to work. While it’s a lot to do, I finally got the hang of it, and I can say that this will be an experience that I’ll never forget!!”

Thanks, Michael!!!

With this daunting economic crisis and an ever-growing desire within the foundation world to increase foundation impact, I’m seeing more and more articles about improving the effectiveness of philanthropic dollars.  At the Kapor Foundation, positive impact towards social change is at the heart of our discussions about our work, and we’re working really hard right now to make sure our grantmaking and other strategies make a difference in our communities.

The Spring 2009 issue of The Nonprofit Quarterly has an article entitled, Measuring Grantmaking Excellence: How Good Are Your Foundation Donors? The article mentioned The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy’s (NCRP) report, Criteria for Philanthropy at Its Best, which gives four criteria for excellent grantmaking.  I’ve listed those four criteria below and will be delving into the NCRP report later to find out more about the organization’s methodology for coming up with these criteria since foundations come in all shapes and sizes.

• Values: engages all communities; provides at least 50% of grant dollars to marginalized groups; gives at least 25% of grant dollars to advocacy, organizing, and civic engagement,
• Effectiveness: invests in the health, growth, and effectiveness of nonprofit partners; provides at least 50% of grant dollars as general operating support and as multi-year grants; and has application and reporting requirements commensurate with grant size,
• Ethics: demonstrates accountability and transparency to constituents; has an engaged, volunteer board of at least 5 people from diverse perspectives; has ethical policies and practices; discloses information freely,
• Commitment: spends most of its assets toward its mission; pays out at least 6% of assets in grants per year; invests at least 25% of assets to support its mission.

It’s nice to read an article that’s written from the nonprofit perspective as opposed to the funder perspective. It challenges me to remember to ask grantee organizations what their most pressing needs are as opposed to foundations placing funder goals at the center of discussions around grantmaking.  I see it as a partnership between a funder and grantee to marry their goals and resources in order to achieve a mutual benefit, hopefully with larger social change at the core.

I’m happy to work for an organization that has a mission to focus on low-income communities and communities of color, that is always looking for new ways to help support the nonprofits that we partner with, and challenges itself and others to be less risk-averse and to think more strategically and innovatively.  Have a great weekend, and if you see any other good articles on this topic, let me know!

(Photo from: www.power-of-giving.com)

Greetings from DC, where I’m finishing up an intense week-long program at the Center for Public & Nonprofit Leadership at Georgetown University.  I just came across this editorial in yesterday’s SF Chronicle written by Emmett Carson, Ph.D., the CEO and President of Silicon Valley Community Foundation. This article, Remaking the Nonprofit Landscape, ties together a number of the issues that this Georgetown program addresses: planning, strengthening nonprofits and the sector as a whole, and capitalizing on opportunities afforded by the economic downturn and the responsive Recovery Act stimulus funds. In short, “allowing the market to work,”  Dr. Carson writes, “will be faster and more cost-effective than promoting mergers. In the long run, it will result in a healthier nonprofit system, one that can deliver effective services and be sustained with fewer resources.” Check it out. What do you think?

Photo of Emmet Carson from siliconvalleycf.org.

Craigslist Foundation’s Nonprofit Boot Camp is just around the corner: this Saturday, June 20th in Berkeley.  If you’re looking for some inexpensive professional development, Nonprofit Boot Camp is for you.  For $75, you get a day of great speakers (Arianna Huffington, Randi Zuckerberg, and Craig Newmark, to name a few), workshops, and networking opportunities.  Workshops address everything form web 2.0 to strategic planning, fundraising to cross-sector collaboration, and nonprofit governance to the pros and cons of applying for 501 (c)3 status.

I’ve been to this event, and while it is packed full of information, you’re sure to walk away having learned something or someone that can positively impact your work!  Plus, many of the sessions will be available via podcast later on, in case you missed something!  Check it out!